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Theoretical critique of "Modern Federalism"
Abstract
Within the American Federal system, according to Peterson (1995), the national government undertakes redistributive policy (and related activities) while the state governments perform distributive policy (and related activities). The premise to be critiqued is related: That a state when given the opportunity will elect to pursue action that does not resemble a redistributive, domestic public policy (Peterson 1995). With Medicaid, the national approach is to redistribute specific goods and services to mandatory beneficiary groups. In the reform of Medicaid for primary medical services, what do the states do? Peterson predicts that the states when given the option would not elect to spread out the goods and services--for example, will not provide for eligibility groups or services beyond those mandatorily required. Fant challenges this by evaluating the veracity of the model's premise as posited by Peterson. If the examined states decide to include in the reform of Medicaid for primary medical services any optional activities, this would not be consistent with Peterson's predictions. Fant evaluates the central premise of Modern Federalism by examining information contained in the 1915(b) waiver application for primary medical services of eight states in terms of intent and the "policy options" identified by the GAO. The evidence and findings in the fourth chapter support the central premise of Peterson (1995). This conclusion is reached after calculating (1) the proportion of policy options that are distributive and redistributive policy actions and (2) the Chi-square statistic for the collected observations. The size of the Chi-square statistic (see Table 4.3) is large enough that the research hypothesis is rejected in favor of the alternative hypothesis.
Subject Area
Public administration|Political science|American studies
Recommended Citation
Fant, Gregory Vincent, "Theoretical critique of "Modern Federalism"" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9812353.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9812353